Technical Support Blog

September 23, 2010

Missing Employee Overtime?

A major reason time clock software makes a great punch clock replacement is its ability to instantly total and separate hours worked into regular and overtime based on defined business rules. This is what saves your payroll specialist and bookkeeper so much time when preparing payroll time clock software hours for your payroll provider.

There are certain situations that cause all hours to be reported as regular hours on your employee timecards. Two of them are related to user settings, and the third is a time calculation setting. We'll look at the user settings in your Virtual TimeClock software first.

The most common reason an employee timecard doesn't calculate overtime is because the employee doesn't have an overtime rule assigned. This is usually not noticed until the first time a timecard is generated after the employee has been added as a new user to your computer time clock. Since a different overtime rule can be assigned to each individual worker, it makes it easy to place your employees on alternative work schedules.

To assign an overtime rule:

From the Lists menu, choose Users.

Select the user from the list of workers on the left pane.

Click the Wages tab.

Click the Overtime drop-down list to assign an overtime rule.

Save and run the worker timecard again.

A second reason you may not see overtime calculated on an employee timecard is because the employee is a salaried worker. Salaried workers are exempt from overtime calculations in Virtual TimeClock. If you need to calculate overtime for a worker, change their wage type to hourly.

To check an employee wage type:

From the Lists menu, choose Users.

Select the user from the list of workers on the left pane.

Click the Wages tab.

Click the Type drop-down list to change the wage type.

Save and run the worker timecard again.

The final reason you may not see overtime calculated on an employee timecard is less common. This time calculation setting only affects daily overtime rules. It controls how many hours a worker has to be off the clock before restarting daily overtime calculations. The default value is 4 hours off the clock. This means that if a worker goes more than 4 hours between shifts, then the accrual of daily overtime will start over with the second shift.

To check the hours off the clock for shift restart:

From the Tools menu, choose Time Calculations.

You'll see the shift restart setting in the Daily & Weekly Overtime section.